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It’s hard to know what to expect from a President-Elect who’s promised a
lot of things he can’t possibly have meant. On the one hand, maybe he did mean
them, in which case, dear God. But on the other, surely not. This leaves a lot
of middle ground for wild speculation, which I now intend to provide.

Also this election has reminded me that however far-fetched I think I’m being,
it’s not far enough. So here are four possible Trumps.

Benevolent Dictator Trump

Beholden to no-one, President Trump dispenses with political bickering,
cuts away swathes of bureaucracy and red tape, and replaces it
with simple, direct, effective solutions that no-one tried before because
they were so caught up in politics or not wanting to offend anyone or
reading books or something. I think that’s right.

Trump crafts an unpredictable yet nimble, energetic, and
effective administration, unafraid to make unpopular decisions so long as
they’re right. It is happy times for everyone who agrees with Trump’s
version of right, which is everyone, by decree of a new federal law.
Protesters and other unpatriotic unAmericans are taken to the desert
to toil to build a statue of Trump so high it can blot out the sun.

Term limits are abolished. In his eleventh year of rule, a small
band of protestors vandalize the statue by blasting off the toupée and are
shot on live national television, their remains displayed outside
the city gates. God-Emperor Trump dies peacefully in his sleep in his
twenty-third year of rule, surrounded by concubines.
After a week of national mourning, the nation descends into bloody civil war
as various full- and half-blooded Trump offspring lead armies in a
battle for control of their father’s empire. Dragons return. Ivanka
rides one.

Robber Baron Trump

By the time he waves goodbye from the chopper, Trump has vacuumed so
much money from the American public that he and his family are the wealthiest
people in modern history, richer even than he claims to be today. A
drip-feed of revelations of fraud, embezzlement, and cronyism on
an unprecedented scale hound him, along with persistent talk of federal
prosecution, but none of it goes anywhere, dissipating like waves against the
rocky shore of Trump’s now-impenetrable empire of lawyers, cash, and paid-up
influence.

Weakened by pillaging, the welfare system faces a short-term
credit crunch, leading to riots among the poor and unemployed. This is held up by
Republicans as proof of the fundamental non-viability of the welfare state
and the need to abolish it altogether, a view supported by low-skilled male white
voters who are shortly to become unemployed themselves as the shock of decreased
government spending rolls through the economy. California and Texas secede and
close their borders. Nevada falls to roaming biker gangs. The Trump family acquires
Manhattan at market-bottom prices and builds a wall around it, a real one,
not just a fence.

Capitalizt Trump

With a businessperson’s win/lose perspective on the economy, Trump abolishes
regulatory authorities, slashes taxes, eliminates labor laws, privatizes
public bodies, and ushers in an ultra-capitalist paradise in which corporations
are free to do whatever the hell they feel like. It is a rich, refreshing new world
for the already-wealthy, who find an ever-expanding array of services aimed
at them, while the poor die of easily-preventable diseases or
in back alleys after muggings gone bad on their way home from one of their
three-dollar-an-hour jobs.

Employment becomes so critical to survival that people revert to the ancient
practice of calling each other by their occupation rather than their surname.
A shoe company deliberately incites a violent riot to promote a new brand of
sneakers. A plucky government agent… ah, you know what, just read the book.

By mortgaging its future, the US is temporarily awash with cash, creating
a false dawn that ushers in a second Trump term. He exits office just as the economy
begins to run off the cliff. Via a running commentary of tweets, he blames
his successor for the ensuring collapse, depression, and takeover by Chinese real
estate speculators, labeling all of the above “sad!”

Commander-in-Chief Trump

Trump has always been a big believer in the “speak loudly and carry a big stick” approach.
To date, his sticks have been lawyers, but starting January 20, 2017, they are
stealth bombers and 7,100 nuclear warheads. Carrying his philosophy into office,
Trump rattles a few sabers before going ahead and invading someone.
It’s an irresistible dynamic: The benefits of military action are largely
personal (status, pleasure of defeating an opponent) while the costs are born by
an American public and purse he’s only borrowing and is allowed to hand back in any condition.

Military adventures in Asia, the Middle East, and Alaska breed a host of new enemies for America,
ensuring the need for ever-more defense spending and a twitchy, paranoid, nationalistic
voting public. Trump exits office calling his military record his proudest
achievement, despite the loss of several million citizens on the east coast after an
incident that looked a lot like a biological attack but officially was just a bad flu season.
Via a running commentary of tweets, he blasts the new President for
weakness as she attempts reconciliation with foreign powers. Much of the Western hemisphere
is annihilated in a nuclear exchange started by a relatively small rogue nation that
nobody was paying much attention to. Trump relocates to Australia and begins to hoard water,
leading to a Mad Max scenario where he is killed in a car chase after the escape of one of his
breeders.

That’s what I’ve got for now. I mean, there are other possibilities. But these feel the
most likely.

Like me, you may be feeling a combination of shock, distress, and terror
at the news that Donald J. Trump will become the next leader of the world’s
largest military and economic superpower.

But it’s all right! It’s all right. It won’t be that bad. I mean, it
will be pretty bad. That’s for sure. But we can get through this. To help
you through this difficult adjustment period, here are some comfort thoughts:

Many Trump policies range from mutually contradictory to the physically
impossible so they can’t all be implemented.

Writers of satire or absurdist comedy need never again be told that their
work is too far-fetched.

Reagan was a TV actor with fantastical economic ideas and latent Alzheimer’s
and the US came out of that pretty okay.

Exposure of electoral system that weights votes of residents of North Dakota
and Wyoming 3-4X greater than those in California and New York, holds
elections on a working Tuesday, and uses plurality voting, may prompt actual
change, perhaps to “Best Out Of Three” system, or drawing straws.

He is pretty funny, for a President.

Inevitable war with foreign power and subsequent nuclear winter may offer
effective solution to global warming.

Nation avoids messy spectre of four years of depressing gridlock where bitter
Republicans hold White House hostage and nothing gets done.

Small children can be told that anything is possible with a straight face.

Shocking the hell out of the ruling class is necessary from time to time in
order to avoid a build-up of complacency and corruption, so why not now.
And election campaigns are all about demonizing opponents but only rarely
are they actual demons.

Max, I hear a lot of authors talk about “fresh eyes”. How long is it after finishing a
first draft until you go back and begin the process of revision?

David

Fresh eyes are very important. I like to wait between one and three minutes. Not really.
That was a joke. I actually don’t wait at all. I go back and re-read and revise
everything all the way through while I’m writing a first draft. By the time
I finish, my first chapter is actually draft thirty-nine, my fifth chapter is
draft twenty, and so on.

I don’t recommend this. The better method is to bang out a first draft without looking
back and only then discover how bad it is. Then at least you have something to
improve. You can’t abandon that thing. You’ve invested too much.

But I can’t do that any more because I know it’s bad. I mean, I like to think of it like I’m
developing higher standards.
But really it’s just that there’s too much counter-evidence to maintain the delusion that I’m capable of writing brilliant first drafts. I’ve seen
them. They are not great.

This exacerbates the “fresh eyes” problem, of becoming too close to a book and losing touch with how it appears to a new reader.
That’s definitely a real thing, and critical in rewriting. If I could truly re-read
drafts through fresh eyes, I could make them a lot better.

But I don’t think the solution is to put it aside for three months. It’s helpful—I have
a couple of unpublished novels that I go back and re-read every few years and the fallow period does show me things
I didn’t notice before. Usually how something I thought was pretty great actually isn’t.
But it’s not enough.

Most writers, including me, need to think about how what they’re writing will
play to a new reader all the time, every sentence. There’s some small technique there, clearing your head
and forgetting what you already know for a moment, that you need to develop in order to write
well. You’re scratching marks on a page; you need to consider what those marks will
do inside other people’s brains. It’s better to become good at this and do it often
than to wait until you have a finished draft and hope a few months away will do it for you.

The hardest time I have is during feedback from early readers. These are people who
are reading something like a fifth or sixth draft, before it goes to my agent or editor.
Often I find someone’s feedback truly mystifying, and it won’t make any sense at all
until I manage to crawl out of my head and into theirs. That process of figuring out how someone
might feel a certain way about the book is tough and confronting but always valuable, even if
I do then decide that they’re insane and we should stop being friends. Because at least I’ll
have fresh eyes.